


At Rest

by fallingvoices



Category: The Bletchley Circle
Genre: F/F, Found Family, Post-War, Recovery, Unresolved Romantic Tension, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:36:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingvoices/pseuds/fallingvoices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war and what comes next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Rest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laughing_Phoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laughing_Phoenix/gifts).



## 1940

Lucy was the first to see them, when she was ushered inside the cramped cottage full of smoke and thundering noise. She hadn't been there two months, and the noise kept her awake at night, a phantom sound that roared in her ears louder than the air raid siren.

There were two of them, standing in Jean McBrien's office with the unease of strangers: it was a little tableau, in reds and golds and shadows, the two girls side-by-side in front of the desk, quite young still, older than Lucy. One was tall, and looked wholly out of place here — a cross between a classical statue and one of those long-feature celebrities all the way over from America. Red lips and red hair and a dark red suit, and a strong confident profile. The other girl was slighter, slimmer, more marked in the face by age. There was absolutely nothing peculiar about her. She wore a soft dark jumper underneath her coat, and when Lucy came in she smiled at her quick and then glanced away, looking calmly back over to Jean. They made an odd pair, the two of them; they were mismatched in color and in shape, but their body language was softening the longer they stood together. They looked as though they were slotting into a space they hadn't quite been aware of before. They were, Lucy thought, as two parentheses in a mathematical equation, separate but alike; two months at Bletchley, Lucy had started dreaming in signals and metaphors.

"Davis," said Jean McBrien.

"Last batch, Miss," Lucy said, and held up the stack of telegrams she'd been given to bring in from the House. "Hello," she added, to the girls.

"Hullo," the tallest of the two said; her voice was hoarse and kind.

Jean sighed. "This," she said, "is Lucy Davis," which was a surprise: Lucy hadn't known Jean knew her first name, or indeed who she was at all. "She'll show you the hut. Get you settled in." The shorter one had barely moved, but her pale eyes returned from Jean to Lucy with apparent interest; her gaze was unnerving in a way Lucy couldn't quite make out. It was straightforward — analytic. She looked at Lucy's dress, her hair, her shoes, and then, once she had taken in all the data she could get, blinked twice and quickly, and smiled again. That was a heavy kind of scrutiny.

"Of course," she said, and was quite proud that her voice didn't stammer. She hoped that she looked calm. In the dark hallway outside Jean's office, she asked: "What're your names, then?"

"Millie," said the tallest one. "This is Susan." Susan hummed in agreement, still smiling.

That was it, then; the first time. It remained in Lucy's memory for a very long time, the little tableau in Jean's office: Jean behind her desk in her dark suit, the tea cups on the tray with the little spoons she brought out for new arrivals, the tall statuesque girl and the slim woman with the singular gaze, all turning to look at her; and herself at the door — caught in contemplation.

 

 

 

## 1941

There was a girl asleep at her desk.

Jean hesitated a moment in the doorway, but the night shift was almost over, and the morning girls were having tea in the mess. It was Susan's desk, and Susan asleep, she thought; the girl — the young woman — who'd come up the other night with a rather mad theory with a fake soldier shuttled between infantry and tank divisions, and who'd been persuasive enough that Jean had taken a gamble, and sent her up to the House. She was keen, smart. Tight as thieves with her desk neighbour. And, currently, mumbling.

"— explain, explode, exploit —" she was murmuring, soft, under her breath, just low enough that Jean couldn't make the words out until she'd stepped right up to her, "exploited, explored, explorer, exploring, exploration —" and then, as though switching to an entirely new tack: "observation, observe, obscene, obscure, obsequious, obsessed, obsolete, obstinate, obstinacy —" It sounded like code, Jean thought, figures leading into each other, sparking off connotations and approximations and synonyms; she was searching for a word in her sleep. A key, Jean thought — the decryption key to a cypher that only she was aware of. She was dreaming. She was going through possibilities, trying out options, running prototype encryption templates. All of a sudden she switched to numbers:

"10-644-22-911-1; 85-99-1; 091-3-974-34 —" A breath. "76-43-0—"

Jean said: "Susan."

Susan woke up all at once, and her eyes went round as plates in the same second her hands flew up to her hair. "Oh!" she said, and stared at Jean open-mouthed. "Jean. Miss McBrien. I—"

"Night shift?" Jean asked. Susan nodded, her mouth curling up. She smiled in a pattern, too — smiled, and looked down, and looked back up and smiled again. Her hands were flat on her desk, very steady. She was quite young still, though she looked older; that steadiness gave her age and poise. "Go have some coffee."

"I — alright. Yes," Susan said. "Yes, of course."

"And get some sleep, girl."

"Of course," Susan said again, and this time her smile was more genuine, and truer to her age; it came over her face like the first brightness of dawn, and then — very quickly — she was slipping out of her chair and out the door.

 

 

 

## 1942

Susan whirled inside their room followed by wind and frost, and woke Lucy up. Millie dropped her powder box, startled, then twisted round to look at her: Susan had paused at once, leaning against the door so it would shut all the way, and was now staring at the floor unseeingly. Her hand was clutched around a book. Then she glanced up and took in the scene — Lucy straightening up on her bed, rubbing her forehead (a migraine, Millie would wager; Lucy was prone to them), the tea things on the low table, Millie at her vanity.

"I," she said, and then stopped, frowning at them.

"Good work?" Millie asked. Her own turn was set for the night shift, hours from now. It was an angry evening out, and cold, and she did not look forward to drafty Hut Four and its unceasing roar of clacking typewriters.

"No," Susan said. She sounded agitated and hot. "Is there any tea?"

Lucy volunteered. The work — thoughtless, mechanical — would, Millie knew, keep her headache at bay. While she was heating up the kettle on the tiny gas plate Susan paced the room again and again and then sat abruptly in Millie's abandoned armchair, placing the book down on her lap. Decisively, looking very much as though she was making an abrupt internal choice, she removed two pages from underneath the dust jacket and held them out to Millie.

"What's this?"

"Col. Patterson gave it to Jean," Susan sighed. Her body seemed to deflate with the sigh, and she leaned her head against the side of the chair and lolled it back to look at Millie. "His boys can't make heads or tails of it. It was on her desk."

It was a poem. Rather, it was a fragment of a poem — four lines in four rows, in German, that did not seem to go much of anywhere: long lost love, a river, a war. The second page was only letters and figures, paired off into ten columns of ten each, and looked well enough like any cipher they had to decrypt daily, but the poem didn't look like an encryption key. It didn't, in fact, look anything like any poem code they had dealt with before. Poem codes were too easy to crack, and the agents carrying them too liable to losses of memory. The text itself was mediocre enough: there was no pattern in it, no recurring motif, barely so much as a dynamic theme running through it; the poet's grasp on symbolism and metaphor was rather weak.

"You smuggled it out," Millie concluded.

"It's only a copy."

"You beast. Here … Lucy — this look familiar to you?" Lucy had been given to memorize several volumes of German and Italian poetry, a few months previous, at the peak of the poem code craze.

Lucy was quiet tonight. She set down the teacups; she read the page over attentively. "No," she murmured, but she looked ticked, as though remembering something she couldn't quite grasp yet. "Is there more of it?"

"No," Susan said. "I tried all the old methods — transposition, substitution — classical _and_ polyalphabetic —  nothing. There's no frequency to it."

"Well, it's poor German," Millie said, getting up. "Four spelling errors in the first two lines alone." She began, absently, to pull out the curlers from her hair, and sat cross-legged on her own bed, stretching her arms over her head. The nape of her neck was cramping from too many hours bent over a narrow desk.

Susan looked thoughtful. But a soft, high-pitched whine started up in the distance — so low at first that Millie thought it was only a whistling in her ear — then bloomed abruptly into a full-blown wail. Millie swore, loudly and profusely.

"Bugger _me_ ," she said, and made a point of drinking her whole cup before she reached  for coat slung over the top of the bathroom door. "You'd think, wouldn't you, they would grow tired on dropping bombs on our heads."

"I'm sure it won't last long," said Lucy.

"Do you have a coat? You'll freeze. Take mine." Lucy, slim as she was, looked swamped in Millie's greatcoat. Millie picked up the man's hat that had lingered on the commode for weeks and screwed it down on her head. "There," she murmured. "Now you look like Ingrid Bergman." They had gone to London on their week off only a fortnight ago; gone to the movies, and a milkshake after. A dance.

Lucy stepped out first, in the freezing corridor. For a moment, lingering in the bright bedroom with a last moment of regret for the little heater and the warm-looking beds, Millie and Susan stood at the door together, looking at her. Then Susan's hand lifted from the doorknob and rested, very briefly, against the small of Millie's back — it made a hard shudder go through her ribcage — and they walked out, a huddled group, towards the air raid shelter in the basement. The poem was clutched to Susan's breast underneath her coat; Millie had seen her put it there.

 

 

 

## 1944

"What's all this, then?"

Jean's voice scattered the girls like sparrows. Only about half a dozen remained, among whom Lucy Davis, Susan was startled to note. She was still sitting at her chair, looking at the blue pages spread out on Susan's desk. She was so young. She was eighteen. She made Susan feel old; but Susan always felt old. Next to her Millie was preparing to talk — Susan could recognize the signs of it, Millie's chin tilting up, her hands twisting together. Even Jean could see it: she paused before the table, and waited, expectant.

"It's motivational, Jean," Millie said, finally — cockily. Her face was bold. The girls who had lingered broke out in muffled laughter, then quieted all at once when Jean held out her hand.

After a moment's hesitation, Susan gathered up the cards in a stack and handed them over. Millie's thigh was hot against her own; Millie was vibrating with suppressed amusement, a kind of feverishness like an electric charge that went through her body and into Susan's. Jean looked through the eight-pagers impassively — of course, Susan thought, she must have seen more than her share of those before — the card on top showed a girl cheekily undoing her nylons, bent over, her mouth red and round and sweet. Jean looked at it for a second before flipping it over to the next: the same girl, seated, holding out her leg to rest her shoe in the lap of a broad-shouldered soldier; the soldier's hands curling around the lace of her stockings, making impressions into the flesh of her thigh; the swell of her breasts against his chest as he kissed her; the girl in a state of undress, sprawled on an unmade bed, smoking a lazy cigarette, looking up at the artist, smiling.

"Quite," Jean said, noncommittal.

"Where did you find _those_?" one of the girls asked from out of Susan's line of sight — Barbara, Susan thought, on Millie's other side, leaning over Millie's shoulder and into Jean's space to catch a glimpse.

"They're easy enough to get, if you know who to ask," Millie said. She sounded flippant, but shrugged uneasily when Jean looked at her. "They distribute it to the troops at the front. They want to —" Her voice went delicate. "Raise spirits."

"I'm sure that's not all that gets a rise," Jean said dryly, and it was only when Lucy let out a sharp giggle that Susan realized what this had been: a joke. A dirty joke, too. Millie's mouth was a red o.

"Jean!" she cried, delighted, in fake outrage, but Jean was already three steps ahead in the conversation: shaking her head, and handing the cards back.

"Get on with work, girls." Her face was wry, though. "Decryption, I'll remind you, is the job, not gawking around looking at dirty pictures." There was a bit in last Sunday's sermon that had touched on bodies — women's bodies, sexless and pure, that kept the nation tight-wound together while the men were fighting: England would be protected, sealed-up, if they sealed themselves up as well, kept their clumsy leaky vessels until tighter rein; a clumsy metaphor that nevertheless these days was everywhere — but Jean, as often, went straight to the heart: "Keep your brains sharp. Don't dawdle. This is all just —"

"Corrupted data," Susan said. Millie gave a shout of laughter and then grinned at her brightly and fiercely for five seconds before retrieving the cards with a brisk gesture, wrapping them up again, and sticking them in her handbag. On Susan's other side, Lucy slunk back down into her chair with a sigh. Noise rushed back in around them: the hard angry clanging of the machines, the murmur of voices, heels clacking, rush of papers like a sea. At first, when Susan had come in, this had been a huge mass of sound, overwhelming, daunting, that threatened to swallow her up whole. But now she could pick out the separate notes, could unravel the thread all the way back to the source, until it — and herself too, and her two girls on either side of her — was all laid out in her head like decrypted code.

 

 

 

## 1945

"You," Millie said, from the doorway, "are missing out. You silly girl, what are you doing out here in the dark, all on your own?"

"I don't know," said Susan, although she did know: come morning they would be leaving the cottages and the tin huts, so she shrugged at the desks around them, the typing machines, the recording tapes, the last remaining file holders on either side of the walls

"You old romantic," Millie said. She was smiling, her once perfect lipstick now a tad smudged. She might have kissed someone. Millie kissed many people, and often.

Susan grinned at her. It was, after all, good to have Millie here. There was music seeping through the doorway and down the hallway, and laughter, and warm voices, the sound of clacking heels and dancing; but Millie had left them behind and now was here, and brought with her warmth and light — more light than the little lamp on Susan's old desk could really afford. Millie came down to her and sat down at the neighbor desk, and produced two flutes of what was probably not champagne but was fizzy and alcoholic; then she said Drink up.

"I can't quite believe we're done," Susan said, once she had. It was emphatically not champagne.

Millie hummed a hum which turned into a snatch of a tune. Probably she'd been dancing. She leaned her shoulder against Susan's heavily, and then leaned her head against Susan's head, and nudged her, again and again until Susan nudged back, until they were both giggling, legs tangled up with the legs of their chairs, and Susan had her face against Millie's smooth, warm neck. From this vantage point she couldn't see much: only the curve of Millie's cheek and the shadow of her eyelashes — the world narrowed to a tapered point.

"I refuse to be done. I reject it," Millie said, and then shouted: "Oh, for the Amazon!" so that it bounced off the walls. This set off a new fit of laughter.

"You really will go?" Susan said finally. "Truly?"

"Truly. You'll come, won't you?"

"Will I? Yes, I will."

"We have the money — enough for a year —" Millie's eyes were bright and exacting in the dark. She grasped Susan around the elbows. "Athens! New York — Mexico. Shall we go to the West Indies? To Indonesia? No, perhaps not. We'll go anywhere. I want to see the Nile. Susan, the war's over." She mulled over this for a bit. "Where do you want to go? Pick. Your great adventure. We'll go there first."

"Glasgow," said Susan, so Millie cried, "Ass!" and elbowed her in the ribs. "Alright, then, Thebes," she said, after a moment's reflexion. "We'll visit the pyramids, if we can manage. Decode hieroglyphics, instead of Ultra ciphers." That was a childhood wish. Millie laughed, her old hoarse whiskey laugh.

"Susan! We'll see the world."

"Yes — yes, we will." At that moment it felt like an absolute certainty, and Millie, certainly, felt like the surest thing in the world. Susan added, bravely, "I really quite love you, you know," and then she straightened up and took her friend's face between her hands and planted a firm kiss on her forehead. Millie caught her hand in both of her own afterwards, and looked up into her face. She looked intent, and somehow scared, in a way Susan couldn't quite understand: Millie was always familiar right up until the moment she wasn't, a line of mathematical code suddenly blossoming into musical harmony.

When she told her this, Millie barked out a crack of laughter and leaned back in her hard little chair, letting Susan's wrist fall between them so that she could reach her cigarette case. "You are," she said, fondly, "quite mad, darling," and that was that. Moment passed. And then, quite suddenly, the war was over.

 

 

 

## 1946

By the eighth month, Millie had stopped sending postcards.

 

 

 

## 1949

"Miss McBrien?" The new receptionist — Anna, Jean thought; yes, that was right — poked her head in the door. "Oh, there you are. You weren't at your desk."

"I'm here," Jean said. She set down her newspaper and smoothed out the fabric of her skirt, and waited for the girl to talk.

"Oh! Oh, I — I. I wanted —"

"Spit it out, girl," Jean said, as unkindly as she could. Her break would not last past the hour, and her tea was running cold.

"My cousin was a nurse — in the war," Anna said, staggeringly, her hands twisted together in the front of her dress. She was very young still — only seventeen, at Jean's guess — and at war's end she must have been a child. No more than thirteen, surely. Not in any fit state to work. "And Renée said that you were one too?"

"I was," Jean said; it was the smoothest lie she had at her disposal. Most people didn't ask too many questions after they knew this much — a nurse, after all, was a perfectly respectable thing to be, and a likely one.

"Were you the matron, Miss?"

"Yes." Well, why not? Close enough.

"My cousin — died," Anna said. "During the war. The last year. She was caught in an incident blast, and she died on the way to the hospital."

"I'm very sorry."

"It's alright. I didn't know her very well. I just know she was — clever. Educated. She liked to read, so —" She gestured half-heartedly to the red-wood bookshelves, towering about them. "She was a lot older than me. Where were you posted, Miss?"

That was easy. "Bletchley. Up north."

"I suppose it wasn't easy for you, managing a place like that. All those people."

It hadn't. Neither was this conversation; Jean didn't much do small talk, but somehow this didn't quite seem to be the case. The girl's signals were muddy. "No."

"I can just imagine you, Miss," Anna said, grinning shyly, "in a matron's cap and everything. Were you, did you — were there a lot of nurses? That you had to take care of?"

"There were," Jean said, and this time her smile was frank, the pattern clear once more. "Good girls. Very brave. They saved lives every night."

Anna looked pleased. "It's so stuffy in here," she murmured, and she crossed the room and opened the window, so that the September air blew in and carried a few newspaper pages from the coffee buffet across the door into the hallway. Anna ran after them, smiled at Jean through the door, and took off, having found what she had come for: vindication, perhaps, or substantiation. Good work there. Jean's tea _was_ cold. She abandoned it.

Her break was nearly over. But she walked to the window, nevertheless, and leaned out; the London air smelled of smoke and metal oil and fog. There was only a little light. It was early morning.

 

 

 

## 1952

"Who is it?" Millie shouted, her nightgown swishing about her calves, and blotted out her cigarette and turned down the radio and wished that her robe wasn't hung on the bathroom door half the room away: at this time of the day it was either the landlady for the rent or Joe, and she wished to have nothing to do with either of them. Seconds passed, though, and she paused mid-swish, and turned back to the door, as behind it her caller hesitated then said softly, in a voice Millie almost recognized: "It's Susan."

"Susan _who_ ," said Millie. Then her heart gave a wild surge. She marched to the door and grabbed it open, and there stood Susan Grey, née Susan H., framed like a painting, looking somehow exactly the same and nothing at all like herself — herself as she had been — with her pale bright eyes in a bloodless face.  She looked tired. She looked absolutely like a ghost, and for one savage moment Millie thought she might even be one: it had been nine years. Until yesterday, she'd been quite convinced she'd managed to forget all about Susan.

"Hello," said Susan, and, yes: that was the sound of her voice.

It turned out, Susan's visit was business more than friendship — if you could call it that. There were five girls dead, she said. Millie recognized the signs, too, of Susan when she got dogged and obstinate, when she thought she had sunk her teeth into a problem worth solving. It must be quite dreary, Millie thought, to have nothing left to solve but the enigma of what to make for tea and the mystery of what's inside your children's mark-book, after you had worked Ultra cryptographs inside out until you could almost believe you had the brain of a German. She supposed it wasn't a perfectly womanly thought; but then she and Susan had only ever been womanly in diagonal ways, and not at all in others.

Five girls dead. They went looking for Jean, and for Lucy.

"There has to be a recurring motif," Susan said, holding on to the bus railing; her gaze was lost in the distance, already looking past Millie. Looking back and away again. "A framework."

"Always is," Millie agreed. She felt there was a sort of poetry to it. She remembered the undecipherable cipher from 1942: in the end, it had come down to a simple ABAB rhyme. In and out, and in and out, over and over, repeating and replicating and reoccurring again and again — phonemes splitting and then looping back together, separating, reuniting, endlessly cyclical.

The key had been to read the puzzle through like rings coiling into each other. Away, then back, then away again.

The war didn't, after all, let you go. The sea voyages and the cruises, the long hot rides through the desert, the boat to India, the New York harbour, even the train that Susan had missed — none of those things had let Millie run far enough away that in the end she didn't return to London, blown-out London with its guts still spilling out. In the end, that steadfast hunger that had strummed through their bodies back in Bletchley had caught up with both of them however far away they'd got, and Millie hadn't got very far at all. It was always coming back into her life, into her head: the war, and Susan.

 

 

* * *

 

 

"Don't you miss the war?" Lucy asked, safe and warm and fed under the blankets on Millie's bed. Susan was hours gone, still shaken from her encounter with Crowley. The image of her and her husband — kind-looking Timothy, and their two little ones — sitting at the supper table earlier tonight with their tea, talking, as surely they must have done, about Lucy — and Harry — came blooming up into Lucy's mind at odd moments. She only just managed to keep it on the outskirts of her memory; she kept flinching away from it. It was bad enough she was here. "Sometimes?"

"Of course not," said Jean, who didn't look up from the papers on her lap. "Don't be silly." In the soft copper lights of Millie's bedroom, she looked the way she had done at Bletchley — all of a piece and unbroken, as solid as a statue carved out in wood: the most solid woman Lucy had ever known. She hadn't flinched when she'd seen the bruising on Lucy's face; only she'd looked sad, and then resigned.

"Well, I bloody well do," said Millie, and added, wryly: "sometimes." She stood, swaying, barefoot, at the corner of the room making tea, and she on the other hand looked nothing like she had done at Bletchley: make-up-less, she had changed out of her dayclothes into a silk blouse and very soft-looking trousers, and looked somehow older and more feminine than she usually did. A tiny crease marred her brow. Normally statuesque, she seemed to have stepped down from her pedestal to pour the tea. Earlier she had been animated, flushed with anger and sorrow on Lucy's behalf. Lucy waited till she had brought down the tray — their fourth cup, and Lucy had been asleep besides — to say, tentative:

"What Susan said —"

Millie sat down. Having said Susan's name, Lucy regretted it now: Millie looked sadder for it.

Jean said, noncommittal in that rough dry way of hers: "Susan has said a lot of things, dear."

"She said we fought, like the men did," Lucy went on, her voice a little raspy. She barreled onwards. "That we made a difference."

"Good thing we did, too," Millie said, folding herself up, lighting a cigarette. The glow of the match lit her face up in bronze for a brief moment. "They say the war could have lasted another two years if it hadn't been for us; for Bletchley."

"Two years!"

"We still do," Jean said. "We do good work. Women do. Needed work, too, I'm sure."

"Hum," said Millie, but she leaned back in her chair, put up her legs, and smoked her cigarette for a long time, blowing rings of smoke to the ceiling. "I do, you know," Lucy heard her say, later on, when they both thought she was quite asleep. "Miss it. _Sometimes_." Jean must have looked disapproving, because Millie scoffed, impatient, and said: "You know what I mean. Susan's not wrong. Hell, Susan's right. We fought as long and as hard as any man did."

"It was a terrible time," said Jean. "We all worked hard."

"Do you like it?" Millie asked, and when Jean didn't answer: "the library? Working there. It's a good place. Airy. A bit dull for you; but then you're not dull at all. I don't miss the air raids, you know, or the night shifts — gosh, I did hate the night shifts — or that dreadful freezing wind between the huts when we'd step out for a fag. But being helpful, getting to be useful in a real way, a big way, and feeling like the work we were putting in mattered, on a grand huge life-changing scale — surely that was important to you too."

"Well, of course it was."

"We mattered then."

"You were my girls," and that seemed to come from deep in Jean's throat. "Of course you mattered. You matter _now_."

Lucy must have made a sound then, or moved a bit, because Millie reached forward and carefully took her hand. "Luce? Lucy. Are you awake?"

"Hmmm," said Lucy — it might have been later than she'd thought; or earlier. "Wha'time is it?"

"Dawn," Jean said. She was no longer in the chair. Or, rather, she'd moved the chair farther from the table and closer to Lucy — Mille was curled up at the foot of the bed now, her legs brought up against her chest, her hands laced over her knees. "You slept well."

"Not very well," said Lucy. She'd had the most awful dreams, really, although, now, she barely seemed to remember any. That was strange. The problem was never trying to remember; it was trying to forget. All that she could recall now was the strangely vivid little picture of Millie and Jean sitting by the bed, drinking tea, and talking about Susan and about the war.

Millie stood. Stretched. It was still dark in the room, and the lamps were turned down, but a soft grey glow was coming through the pale curtains. Millie's nightgown against Lucy's belly was very soft. "Tea?" she asked, and then groaned. "No, I'm sick of tea. Coffee. Hard strong coffee, the kind that melts the burning plate — and the palate —"

She busied herself with the gas burner, and Lucy leaned back against the pillows and watched Jean first undo and then do up her hair: it was surprisingly long, and very dark and thick. It was usually tied in so strict a chignon that Lucy had never quite paid attention to it — Jean wore dark suits and her hair up and tightly-wound, and rarely put on red lipstick, and she'd never seen her looking any way else. There was something intimate in the way she was doing it now, and when she noticed Lucy watching she instructed her to pin the dark coils down at the base of the head, carefully, so it wouldn't pinch.

"Like this?"

"Perfect, dear," said Jean, smiling.

"Coffee," Millie rejoined, and brought down three cups balanced in both hands. " _Un café pour vous, mademoiselle, madame_ , Susan will be here soon I hope."

They drank. It was dark and bitter and very hot, the kind of thing Lucy usually shied from, but now it was a comfort. It smelled like Bletchley, like cigar smoke and typewriter oil. And, drinking it, a scene from over a decade ago blossomed up into her brain: a tableau in that little office with chintz chairs and a very ugly set of teacups that Jean had reigned over at Bletchley. She had come in with a stack of decrypted telegrams, and there they had been — Jean in her dark suit behind the desk, and Millie tall and commanding like a Hollywood movie star, wearing a red blouse and trousers ( _trousers_! Lucy thought: she had been thrilled at the time), and Susan, with her penetrating eyes and her calm steady smile. Herself in the doorway. They had stood in a line, straight-backed, at attention, tin soldiers in a tin hut. The picture was bright in her mind, and warm.

"I'm going to go," said Lucy. "Home, I mean." Jean and Millie both looked at her. She wouldn't cry, she thought; her heart was hot in her chest, but it was brave, and she had saved lives, too, back then — and she wouldn't cry, though her eyes burned and her face ached. "To fetch my things, you know."

"Oh!" said Millie. Then she smiled, the kind of smile that came slowly over the face and brightened it all over, the kind of smile Lucy remembered: _this_ was Bletchley's Millie, hungry and vital and very, very kind.

"Well," Jean said. "Quite." In the cold grey blur of early morning, she still looked carved in wood, every line and wrinkle etched into her face. But Millie got up impulsively and threw open the curtain and drew up the glass, let the flight flood in, a very pale gold now, and Jean, slowly, unfolded. Her face turned up towards the window and into the light, and she looked out into the street, her head tilted on her neck like a bird's, curious and watchful, like she was breathing in the morning air.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, Laughing_Phoenix! This was a lot of fun to write, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
> 
> Much love to H, who encouraged me to sign up in the first place and then kept cheering me on right up till the deadline. I would never finish anything if it weren't for you alternatively kicking my ass and holding my hand.


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